Proust, Beckett, and Narration
Cambridge University Press, 10/13/2003
EAN 9780521828475, ISBN10: 0521828473
Hardcover, 204 pages, 23.6 x 16.4 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
This a comprehensive comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century's most important writers of prose. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, James H. Reid compares the two novelists' use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. Reid focuses on the narrator's search to represent the voice that speaks the novel, a search, he argues, that structures first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust's writing on Beckett's own work as well as Beckett's subtle reworkings of Proust's themes and strategies. This study is an important contribution to critical literature, and offers fresh perspectives on the crucial importance of the Recherche and the trilogy in the context of the twentieth-century novel.
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. Remembering forgetting
Le drame du coucher
2. Impressions, the instant of artistic consciousness, and history
3. Lying, irony, and power
Proust's deceptive allegories
4. Proust's forgetful ironies
5. Molloy's way
the parody of allegory
6. Moran's way
the forgetful spiral of irony
7. Malone Dies and the impossibility of not saying I
8. The Unnamable
the death of the ironical self and the return of history
Notes
Bibliography
Index.